I'm a bit tired of the media simply republishing the PR pablum offered up by the Wikimedia Foundation, while ignoring the core items that are really driving the reason why women (and men) are less and less likely to want to edit Wikipedia. It's because of a baked-in culture of tolerance for strange and offensive people in the highest ranks of Wikipedia leadership. For example, it was pointed out to executive director Sue Gardner that one of her contractor staff members was gabbing online with other Wikipedians, and wrote: "You should however have instead taken your pen, punched a hole in her windpipe and looked on as her attempts to wave for help got increasingly feeble." What did Sue Gardner have to say about this horrifyingly misogynistic comment? She said she didn't feel the need to familiarize herself with the case, and that it was just an "informal jokey exchange". Women are smart. They can see when an organization is rotting from the top down, and they simply choose not to participate in such an organization.

As for the media like Wall Street Journal, I suggest that you investigate -- truly dig in and *investigate* Wikipedia. Throw away everything you've been spoon-fed by the Wikimedia Foundation and Jimmy Wales, and start observing what people outside the project have to say about it. And simply observe it for yourself. Try editing an article or creating a new article -- do you feel "welcomed" by the Wikipedia community?

12:04 pm August 19, 2013

Greg wrote:

This sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Anytime women are underrepresented in a group, there will be feminists that try to uncover the hidden sexism that must be the cause. Isn't it possible that women, on average, just aren't as interested in editing Wikipedia?

From Ms. Gardner's blog: "I've heard more stories than I can count of women who gave up contributing because their material was edited out, almost always because it was deemed insufficiently significant."
The only way that another editor on wikipedia knows your sex is through you handle, so either there are male editors that make it their job sniff out female contributions and delete them because said editors are sexist, or maybe these women really are posting "insufficiently significant" material and wrongly assuming that their sex had something to do with it. Maybe male editors face this same issue. If so, we'll never know about it because it wouldn't be a possible case of sexism, and thus wouldn't be newsworthy.

12:45 pm August 19, 2013

Howard B. Golden wrote:

Of course women feel unwelcome at Wikipedia. So does everyone else. The root cause is the prevailing "deletionist" bias of the rules. Anyone can claim an article should be deleted because the subject isn't "notable." My question has always been, "Notable to whom?" My personal interest is in more articles on open source software applications. They are notable to me (and many others), but constant critiques on Wikipedia claimed that they weren't notable because no articles had appeared in the news about them. Is that a big surprise to anyone? Imagine spending a fair amount of time writing an article only to have it tossed because one person claims the subject isn't notable. If you can't find a news article somewhere else about the same subject, your work goes poof!

12:53 pm August 19, 2013

Charleen Larson wrote:

Oh sure, I'd love to work anonymously for free! Where do I sign up?

Gee, even PuffHo lets you have a byline.

This article is ludicrous. Everyone knows that if you don't fit in with the prevailing Wikipedia bias, your contributions are trashed.

1:05 pm August 19, 2013

Anonymous wrote:

There is a trivial solution to this.
I figure that there are at least 100 universities in the US that have Women's Studies curricula. Some enterprising professor(s) could have her students research subjects, and publish this research on Wikipedia. If the universities want to control the intellectual property, have the students publish on a university web site, and then summarize and link in wikipedia.

1:09 pm August 19, 2013

Anonymous wrote:

Why wouldn't they hire or seek out Librarians? People in the business of information.

1:19 pm August 19, 2013

Roger4336 wrote:

It is hard to know what to make of this article. It is ceertainly not Wall Street Journal. This may be why it is on a blog, and the usual protocol for lresponses (real name) is not followed.

The substance is a small amount of anecdotal evidence by women who feel that they have a grievance. This is uncritically related by a writerwhose name suggests a woman.

Wikipedia is an excellent source of information on a huge range of subjects. It also has it quirks, which reflect lthe makeup of its contributors and staff. In addiition to being mostly male, they tend to be young, technologically aware, politically and socially liberal, and environmentally inclined, to name a few.

Just one example: Wikipedia articles about cities can have a category, "Sons and Daughters of xxxx." These lists are often weighted to people the contributors know best, figures from sports and contemporary culture.

1:57 pm August 19, 2013

REEF POINTS wrote:

Ok, if it's been 12 years since Wik was founded and still women haven't shown interest in contributing, might it be just that? Self-selection, or more accurately, self-nonselection. The libs/progs/feminist constant search for some nefarious reasons for phenomena like this is truly tiresome. So, what will be done at this conference anyway?

3:56 pm August 19, 2013

Susan Corwin wrote:

The problem is:The Game Is Rigged

Where does a 600lb gorilla sit and where (on whose lap?) is Betty Boop allowed to sit?

Physical size/strength with hormonal domination urge and years of "take the hill" training where
"Winning isn't everything, it is the only thing"
coupled with the Dunning-Kruger effect effect leads to an environment where
folk with "better things to do"
don't bother.

3:58 pm August 19, 2013

Technologist wrote:

Most of the reasons women avoid Wikipedia raised by Ms. Gardner do not apply exclusively to women. I think the most obvious explanation for the gender gap is simply that the majority of Wikipedia editors are middle-class 18 to 30 year old white males who like technology: i.e. "geeks" in the modern lexicon. This gender gap exists on Wikipedia because it exists in the IT space as a whole. I think the obvious solution is to address the reasons why more women don't enter the technology field. When you have more female technologists, you'll have more female Wikipedia editors.

4:54 pm August 19, 2013

Matthew wrote:

To the anon asking about librarians, that is actually a big focus of Wikipedia editors working on the gender gap. There is currently a banner on Wikipedia for logged-in users announcing "Wikipedia Loves Libraries," which you can google to find more info. I'd add links here to blog posts from the Wikimedia blog, but it seems to strip links.

7:09 pm August 19, 2013

pandering no more wrote:

disgusting, this is total BS and the reasons given are specious... maybe most woman have a life, except for the career feminists that find discrimination or are out of a job!

7:22 pm August 19, 2013

Eric Barbour wrote:

As a longtime critic of Wikipedia, and co-author of a planned book about its foundation, I can tell you innumerable stories about its internal corruption, its institutional sexism and misogyny, its paranoia and intolerance. Yet people continue to pretend that Wikipedia is "fundamentally good" because they like what content they see, and choose to ignore the bad parts (of which there are many).

And just by the way: quoting Sue Gardner simply proves the point, because she has already turned in her resignation. She lasted an unusually long time in the toxic world of the WMF for a female, more than 6 years. There are many dark rumors about how she managed that feat (a hint: they did not involve her "organizational skills").

WMF hired a female CTO, Danese Cooper, and she only lasted one year (2010-2011). Ask her what she thinks of Wikipedia's institutional sexism. Florence Devouard, the successor to the ever-nauseating Jimmy Wales as Chair of the WMF Board of Trustees, only lasted two years in that position. Women in high positions at the WMF tend to be "figurehead" personalities, with little power over the organization itself.

8:57 pm August 19, 2013

Bruce wrote:

Of all worldwide institutions. Wikipedia is one whre the gender of the vast majority of registered editors is not even known. If women do not participate it is because they choose not to - nothing, NOTHING stops them when signing up, signing in and becoming an editor.

9:11 pm August 22, 2013

truth01 wrote:

TYPICAL VICTIMIZATION STRATEGY of feminists. Already when you see feminism and patriarchy related articles of wikipedia, you will feel that it is totally oriented by radical feminism Their efforts to trumpet women scientists who had minimal important works, were deleted; now they are blowing their horns.

as per wikipedia foundation, 87% wikipedia editors are male. Till 2005 100% editors were male.
WHEN THE MOST REPOSITORY OF SCIENTISFIC WIKIPEDIA WAS CREATED BY MALES AND MADE A SUCCESS till 2005, FEMALES will come up and do NOT contribute to the general science/articles/technolgoy in a major way, FEMALES WILL JUST FOCUS ON THOSE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES SHOWING HOW WOMEN WERE GREAT. Rest of the pure technology articles or pure arts articles, they do not even bother.
And start complaining of victimization, how they are being unfairly treated. THIS IS AN OLD FEMINAZI TRICK, REPEATED INFINITY NUMBER OF TIMES IN EVERY AREA.

5:50 pm August 24, 2013

Sarah wrote:

truth01...what? I'm a woman and I edit a variety of Wikipedia articles. I don't focus on articles Showing How Women Were Great.

6:04 am August 27, 2013

Jonathan Cardy wrote:

Thanks for writing this.

Yes there is a gender bias in the Wikipedia editing community, and yes we as a community would like to understand it better and address that bias. There are several partial explanations that have been posited:

1 The editing interface is more suited to programmers than the general public, and programmers are mostly male. This theory is rarely contested and is currently being tested by the introduction of an editing interface that will seem more user friendly to non-programmers.

2 Wikipedia is a collaboratively written enyclopaedia and the method of writing it is for everyone's contributions to be editable by everyone else. This allegedly creates a more masculine environment with men treating the reversion of their contributions as a challenge and women treating it as a rejection. I personally know both men and women who don't follow the stereotype here, but perhaps this theory contributes to the skew.

3 Wikpedia has unintentionally made itself into a very masculine environment, with some of the social niceties stripped out of our online interactions in the name of efficiency.

4 Wikipedia editing is a voluntary activity and men generally have more spare time to contribute than women do. We know that we have other skews than just the gender one, not surprisingly we seriously underrepresent parents of young children. So if it is true that men generally have more free time, then this could be a contributory factor

5 For whatever reason we have a masculine bias, and it has become self reinforcing as we have better coverage of more "masculine" topics such as battleships than we do of more "feminine" ones.

As a community I don't think we yet know what the relative importance is of these various factors. But I believe that we do have a strong consensus that it is true that we have a gender bias, a pretty strong consensus that it is a problem, and that those partial solutions that have been identified have strong consensus for implementation. What we lack is a full understanding of what needs to change.

What I think we need now is for some real investigative journalism. It would be good to have some women who've not previously participated in Wikipedia create accounts that aren't obviously gender specific, spend some time editing, and then write up their experiences. I would hope that provided they stick to notable subjects and properly cite their sources they would have a positive experience. But if there are things that we are oblivious to but which offend most women then it would be good to hear about them.

Disclosure - I am a volunteer administrator on the English Language wikipedia and a part time employee of Wikimedia UK

2:11 pm August 27, 2013

Katja wrote:

I'm curious how they know the gender of their contributors. I'm a woman, I've been editing Wikipedia since 2004, and I don't recall anyone asking my gender. I have a gender-neutral username, don't indicate my gender on my user page (because who cares?) and most of my edits are in articles that are gender neutral in interest, because that's where my interests happen to lie. Does that mean I'm being "counted" as a man? That seems rather sexist....

3:55 pm August 27, 2013

Jonathan Cardy wrote:

Hi Katja, no we aren't counting you as a man. We have had several surveys done by us and others. We've also had informal feedback from people attending real life meetups, and estimates of people who do declare their gender online. All those things indicate that a large majority of wikipedians are men. Of course it's possible that you anonymous editors of undisclosed gender are collectively pulling our legs and are so predominately female that we don't have a gender skew, or we even have a female one. But from the data that we do have it looks unlikely.

6:14 am August 29, 2013

Dave wrote:

According to Wikipedia, 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. 129,675 editors have performed an edit within the last 30 days

300,000 x 13% (average) = 39,000 female editors.

129,675 x 13% = 16,857 female editors.

Maybe proportionately speaking there are fewer female editors but on a numerical basis, it is sufficient.
If all these editors were to have a 'meetup' at a certian location, then it is enough to fill up a whole rural town, or city suburb.

10:44 am September 12, 2013

Canadian Friend wrote:

You can not " make" women more interested in Wikipedia, just as you can not make people like sugar free bitter chocolate.

Women are simply not interested in the same things men are, women do not really want to know how things work or why things are the way they are.

I remember reading somewhere that a larger percentage of women is science illiterate than men

science, maths and general knowledge is like sugar free bitter chocolate to women. You can not make them like it.

But we all know feminists will find a way of penalizing and punishing men until the numbers are to their liking.

9:43 am February 3, 2014

Sean wrote:

What "barriers to entry?" All you need is an internet connection and the will to share information with the world. Neither is WIkipedia's problem.

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